Pretending
by NotYourBirthday
Summary: And she pretends the hateful words coming out of her parents' mouths don't hurt but really, she's gotten so good at pretending she's forgotten how to tell the truth. OC-centric. Now a Two-shot. Please review.
1. Chapter 1

This was written on a whim and the idea of a bender with Equalist parents that wouldn't go away.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but the original characters.

**Edit: 8/27/12**

* * *

(Sometimes she thinks about telling them the truth.)

"Benders are abominations!" her mother throws her hands up in exasperation as her father read out loud an article about the Agni Kai's latest spree. "They should just be carted off to Amon to be cured." She continues her crazed ranting, spewing out words like _sins of nature _and _unnatural _and _let these monsters go to school with my children, _and it's just like any other day.

Rin says nothing and her father and her brother, Akio, nod

(Most of the time she thinks the truth can wait for another ten years.)

Sometimes she sneaks away to a probending match and they leave her breathless: the way everything lights up when a firebender shoots flames out of their hands (if she closes her eyes and wishes hard enough she could feel the heat on her face). The way the earth, immovable and unyielding, obeys the will of an earthbender.

The way the water ebbs and flows, cool and beautiful in the hands of a master bender, twisting and curving, and so beautiful yet so powerful, she almost cries.

(How can anyone hate something so wonderful?)

On her way home, she's cornered by a couple of guys from the Triple Threat Triad.

"Hey there, doll face." the earthbender, she can tell by the clothes, green and brown and torn and stained with something that might be dirt or might not, leers at her with a lecherous smile on his face that sent chills down her spine (and suddenly she forgets the training her parents made her do since she was four). His two friends are behind her and she thinks that she's so stupid for walking down this alley all alone. "What's a pretty thing like you doing in a place like this?" He comes closer and she can smell his breath, it smelled like cactus juice and she _wants to go right home now_. He reaches up and strokes her face lightly with the back of his hand.

"Help!" she screams, flinching away from the man, but backing into the chest of the waterbender by mistake. Her voice high pitched and loud. The earthbender, who was right in her face, recoils at the noise. "Help!" she screams again. There's an opening from where the man moved away and she slips through the gap. Someone grabs her arm and turns her around.

"Now where are you going, doll face?" The firebender creates a ball of fire in his hand, its light no longer warm, only menacing and deadly. "We were just getting started."

(She knows why, she's always known why. But she can't bring herself to hate something that's such a big part of her.)

Most of the shock has worn off enough to clear her head and she remembers the chi-blocker training her parents put her and Akio through for years. She clenches her hands into fists and strikes quickly at the firebender's pressure points, cutting off his chi and causing his to fall boneless to the ground.

"She's one of those Equalist chi-blockin' morons!" the earthbender yells angrily. Suddenly, her hands, which were stretched out in front of her, were being restrained by something cold and hard, she looks back to see the waterbender looking down at her wearily.

"Tell that Amon palooka," she hears the earthbender say menacingly, she turns her head to see him inches from her face. "That no one messes with us benders and gets away with it with all their fingers attached." The grip the ice has on her hands tightens so much that is hurts and it still keeps squeezing tighter. She tries to get the ice to melt away but only succeeds in relieving a little of the pain.

"Hey!" A voice called from behind her. "Let her go!" She's so relieved that her knees nearly give out from under her, but she stops herself.

Falling down right now would be bad.

"Believe us, pretty boy!" The waterbender yells back with a smarmy grin. Rin's skin crawls. "This is a damsel you don't wanna be saving."

"I think I can decide that for myself."

Underneath her feet, the earth quakes and the waterbender is launched ten feet into the air and lands quite a distance away. The earthbender stomps his foot on the ground and a chunk of earth flies out and hovers just below his head. Rin jumps up in the air and maneuvers so that her hands are in front of her and hits the earthbender in the head with the block of ice encasing her hands. The boulder floating in the air falls as he does and the ice cracks down the middle. She hits the ice against the building on the right and it finishes the job of releasing her hands. She rubs them together for warmth.

"Not bad." The same voice from before said but it was much closer. She turned and saw a boy, her age, maybe a little older looking at the fallen fire and earthbenders on the ground.

"I could say the same thing about you." She smiles. "Thank you, so much. I don't know what would have happened if you hadn't come along. I don't know how I can repay you."

"I think you would have handled yourself fine." he assures. She doubts that. "I never thought I'd see the day a chi-blocker would say thank you to a bender."

"Oh, I'm not-well I am, but I like benders, they're pretty oka-I mean I'm a ben-uh, thanks again, if there's anything I can do for you, uh, guy I'd be happy to uh- well, thanks so much and um, bye!" she awkwardly stutters and rushes away from the boy, missing the amused and confused smile on his face.

(And then she remembers why she loves it so much.)

Before she goes home, she cleans herself up as best she can. Though she's not as filthy as she thought she was, she notices a burn on her arm and tons of little scratches on her hands. She covers up with her sleeve and bag as best as she can and goes in.

"Hey, Rin. You're home late." Her mother greets her. She puts an apologetic look on her face.

"Yeah, sorry mom. I was at the library and lost track of time. Won't happen again."

"It's alright." Her mother smiles warmly and she feels so much better now and she just wants to hug her mother and let her make her problems go away. And she would, without asking what was wrong.

(And she wonders, not for the first time, how someone so nice can be someone so hateful.)

She rushes up the stairs and locks herself in the bathroom. She fills the tub with water, cool, soothing water, and heals herself. A discovery she made one day when she was five and scrapped her knee from falling out of a tree. She breathes in deep and closes her eyes; she immerses her arm in the water and focuses on the cool water. Rin feels the water take away her pain and something inside her just clicks and she can see the healing glow surround her injuries and after a few minutes, any evidence of her encounter in the alley is washed away. She turns around and sits down on the bathroom floor, leaning against the bathtub and pressing her legs against her chest, breathing deeply and trying to calm down.

Rin stands up and bends the water off of her arm even though she could just towel dry. She spends a few more minutes clumsily bending the water. It takes a while for the water to follow her, countless hours poring over scrolls in the Republic City Library could not replace actual training, but she manages to bend it around her. She tries to move her arms gracefully, like the waterbenders she sees at probending matches, but her movements are stiff and awkward and nothing at all like the grace she is capable of when she's bending and twisting and tumbling through the air during chi-blocking training and multiple, little drops of water falls from her stream of water above her head until the entire stream just falls to the floor. She grabs a towel and quickly tries to wash up her mess and then tries again. It's only when Akio yells for her to get out of the bathroom that she drains the water away. She opens the door and mutters a quick apology to her brother and he rolls his eyes.

"You're always in there so long. It's weird."

She suddenly decides to stop practicing in the bathroom.

They are sitting in the dining room and in a near mirror image of this morning except her mother is the one reading the evening news and her father is complaining that all the benders taking all the jobs and not leaving anything for the non-benders who really need the money. Her brother is giving his own opinion here and there, about how these benders jumped him before school and took his wallet and how a firebender stole his girlfriend.

Rin says nothing about Aki not being his girlfriend and that she and Li really like each other and he's just being an idiotic jerk.

...

Rin is good at pretending. She pretends that she agrees wholeheartedly with the hateful words spewing out of their mouths like spidersnake venom that burns through her veins and she pretends that would never think about going to one of those disgusting glorification of bending known as probending and she pretends to hate benders as much as they do and she pretends she means what she says about the world being better off without benders.

(And she pretends that pretending doesn't break her heart over and over again.)

Sometimes she thinks about telling them the truth. But whenever she tries, she stops and lies to their faces and pretends that she thinks that it was for the best, that they were better off not knowing the truth and that she was happy the way things were right now.

(But really, she's gotten so good at pretending she's forgotten how to tell the truth.)

* * *

Gosh, I love Legend of Korra and Avatar: The Last Airbender so much they're so emotional and it teaches you so much and it's all just underneath a layer of AWESOME! I want it to be Saturday already! Legend of Korra and Young Justice are the good cartoons on these days.

Anyway, please review.


	2. Chapter 2

This was going to be a one-shot but then I thought about how the 'finding out' thing would go. I'm not quite happy with it but tell me what you think.

Disclaimer: I only own Ren and her family and that earthbender guy who saved Rin in Chapter 1.

**Edit: 8/27/12 **

* * *

Oh, they find out of course. After all, every secret comes out into the Light eventually.

(But couldn't the Spirits find in their hearts to give her just a few more years?)

All is quiet, no one moves, no one makes a sound and Rin wants something to happen and absolutely nothing at all to happen at the exact same time. She is looking everywhere: at the stone walkway cutting through the green grass of the park, at the empty night sky save for the crescent moon , at her shoes half a size too big and well worn. Everywhere and anywhere that wasn't in the general area of her family and their shocked and angry faces.

Rin can't tell you that she saw it coming, as her face was turned away and her mind just became a blank canvas and she probably doesn't even have the mental capacity to blink at the moment, but she can say that she wasn't surprised when her mother's hand slaps her cheek, her mother's fingernails dragged down her cheek, scratching the skin and drawing blood.

She still doesn't look at them, but she's regained enough mental ability to remember the time that those hands had held her when she was scared of the monsters in her closet.

(Held her when she needed to be held, wiped the dirt off her face, baked cookies, handed her the spoon to lick off the extra cookie dough...)

"How dare you!" her mother's voice rings out in the near empty park and it's not that loud, it can't be that loud, but Rin feels as if all of Republic City can hear her. "How dare you!" she repeats again, quieter this time but so much angrier. Rin is looking at bushes, green and lush, and she just wants to jump in them and never leave, she wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground and die. In her mother's voice, she can hear barely restrained anger. A familiar anger from all those times Akio had done something stupid and she can't find the words to properly express herself.

(and she remembers that voice singing nursery rhymes about stars and wishes and star light, star bright, the first star I see tonight...)

But from all those times, Rin could hear the worry in her voice. Wondering if her baby boy was alright and that he was safe and hoping he knows how much she loves him.

She doesn't hear any of that now and her vision is getting blurry and she _will not cry_.

"How could this have happened?" her father asks himself frantically. "Where did we go wrong?"

"This is all your fault!" Rin glances at them just for a moment, just to satisfy her curiosity. Her mother had turned to her father, pointing a thin finger with blood underneath the nail accusingly at her father and glaring at him with furious eyes. "Your grandfather was from the Northern Water Tribe!" she says in an accusing way, which is strange because he doesn't control where his family comes from. "It's your fault that she's, that she's a bender." Her mother, her sweet, wonderful mother, spits the word out like it's the vilest curse, the most hateful slur, and Rin is torn between bursting into tears and getting angry, so she does neither and continues looking at the ground and wishing it was this morning again.

( I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight...)

"I'm sorry." she chokes out finally. Her voice is hoarse and she's just barely hold back tears and she just wishes this was all just a dream, a horrible, heartbreaking dream and that she'll wake up in her bed and her family won't know.

(But in the back of her head, she wonders what she's apologizing for. For being a bender? For being herself? For being born?)

The shouting stops and they turn to look at her and she summons courage she didn't know she had and looked up back at them. She had went over this scenario over and over in her head since she was a scared little five years old who didn't want her mommy and daddy and big brother to talk about her like they talked about people like her.

(Mommy, Daddy, Kio, I love you, I love you, I love you. Please don't leave me.)

They didn't say anything, they just looked at her. Mother and father look at her like a stranger who just spat on them and stole their money and Akio has this indescribable look on his face and she doesn't know whether that's a good or bad thing but she's going to go with bad.

"I'm sorry for not telling you and for lying to you for so long." she says in a rush, not pausing so they don't interrupt her. "I was so afraid of what you would do." She chokes back a sob. "But-but, I'm exactly the same as I was before you just know now, nothing's changed and please, I love you and-" her voice is sounding more and more desperate and she's having a hard time holding back her tears and she wonders if she can bend them away but she's sure it would only make things worse. "Mom, Dad, Akio, please-"

Her father's deep voice cuts through her apology that is becoming increasingly high pitched by the second. "You are not our daughter."

The tears she was fighting off fell from her eyes. Those were the words she had been dreading since the euphoria of the water was glowing and my cuts all healed and it felt so good wore off.

"I'm sorry." she whispers and falls to her knees in the middle of the pathway cutting "I'm so, so sorry! Please, I'll-I'll stop bending. I'll become a chi-blocker like you wanted. I'll stop bending and I'll never do it again, I _swear_ just _please _don't- "

"It's not good enough." her mother's voice sounds so hard and cold, like ice. "You are an abomination. Unnatural. I am so ashamed- I can't believe someone like me, _someone normal,_ could give birth to something like you." she looks like she wants to say more but her father places his hand on her shoulder, turns her around, and leads her away. Rin just stands there, feeling numb all over like someone just chi-blocked her and it doesn't feel good. She's heard words like that all the time at her house but it hurts so much more when it's directed at her.

(Unnatural freaks! They should be wiped of the face of the planet. Diseased abominations!)

Akio is still standing there and for a second she lets herself hope that maybe, just maybe, he still loves her.

Her hopes are dashed when his expression hardens and he glares at her and it takes all the strength she doesn't have to keep herself upright and not crumple into a hysterical heap on the ground. Akio walks away and Rin has no idea what to do.

(Part of her notices he's limping away and part of her wishes he would just let her heal him.)

She's not entirely sure how long she stands there but she's not entirely sure where she can go so it doesn't really matter to her until it begins to rain. She thinks about trying to bend some of it away

(Horrifying freaks. They have jobs, money, power that should belong to us! They have no idea how hard it is to be a non-bender!)

But she stops.

She looks around the park for shelter when spots the bridge she would hide under when she was little whenever she and Kio would play hide and seek.

She stumbles over to duck underneath the bride, her limbs not working properly, and crawls underneath.

(It's not as comfortable as she remembered. She's grown the past few years yet somehow she's still a little girl hiding from the world.)

She listens to the rain _plip-plop _and _drip-drop_ and it sounds comforting, somehow. Maybe because she wasn't able to hear herself cry over the rain.

(Mommy, Daddy, Kio, please don't leave me. I love you still.)

* * *

**Yeah, I took out the bush thing and replaced it with rain and a bridge, but I _still _thought the bush thing was weird and awkward but I still want her to meet Sparkly Sparkly Bush Man. Another chapter is in the works but school's coming up and life sucks.**


End file.
